Sunday, November 16, 2008

spiritual autobiography

Officially, I have served in two fellowships.

From 1983 to 2003, I faithfully attended and served in Worldwide Church of God.

Worldwide Church of God, originally founded by Herbert Amstrong, who is known by Evangelical Christianity as a heretic. I don't believe he was though. He sincerely preached the Old Testament and its relevance to modern Christianity. His message was eventually rejected by his spiritual successors.

His successors eventually sold Evangelical Christianity to me as teenager. I studied Billy Graham's evangelism course and later Dr. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion. I even joined Inter-School Christian Fellowship (ISCF), an organisation for Christian students. I later went to University, where for a time I attended the University and College Christian Fellowship (UCCF). After hearing them referring to a particular church group as a cult, I was no longer committed to the group.

After a year, I joined Advent Fellowship. This is a Fellowship for Students who were Seventh Day Adventists. This lead me to become a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church and even to become a vegan. Thus I served in the church for a number of years.

I married a Baptist young lady, who was a believer in the Charismatic movement, which lead us to questioning each other's foundation. Eventually we met persons who believed in the Hebraic roots of Christianity, which helped me to rediscover truths that I left from Amstrong, and questions that were not answered in any of our denominations. In fact, Amstrong came closest out of all to addressing those questions.

This saw me returning to the roots, visiting both Church of God International and United Church of God. Despite the truths taught, both organisations still omitted other things that I had learnt from the various spiritual movements that God had exposed me to.

I also became involve in visiting the Jewish synagogue and subscribing to both a Judaism mailing list and a Messianic Jewish mailing list. These also helped me to recognise some of the biases that I learnt in my Christianity. It also helped to correct my learnt misconceptions about Jews and their beliefs.

See my slideshow below for more information

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